Update on recent troll and sock puppet activity

You have probably already noticed, but coltonlolz has now been banned for repeatedly bumping old threads with pointless or irrelevant posts. He was given several warnings about his behavior which he ignored.

Request from the moderation team: in future if you see this kind of activity, please notify one of us (SilverWook, Moth3r or Anchorhead) in a PM instead of posting a response in the bumped thread. Additional posts in a bumped thread just make extra work for us when deleting posts.

Sock puppet accounts/username spoofing

You may also have noticed an account with username spoofed to look like coltonlolz's. This spoofing was a result of someone exploiting a vulnerability in the forum software (which, incidentally, has now been fixed). Although the accounts looked identical, they were completely separate, and nobody who created an account through this bug was able to access the true account's posts or messages, or cause any real harm other than confusing the user base.

Last time this happened I threatened to ban the main account associated with future sock puppet accounts - and this would have happened to AnctuFaalb, had he not owned up of his own accord and posted a public apology.

From this point on, no more sock puppet accounts. The two long-standing account that slipped through the net have now been dealt with, and any future socks will result in the banning of both the sock and the main account.

A shame that we lost Olie but it was, frankly, inevitable. Guess we'll all have to step up the handsome to compensate.

And Jay, while you're at it, how about fixing the advanced text editor? Since it seems you're working on the software, this is worth addressing as well. Getting really tired of this format changing happening to me at random.

Just because you know the cause doesn't mean it shouldn't be fixed. This is a new bug that's only popped up in the past... what, couple of months? At least, I'd never had it happen to me before. Hell, if I recall correctly AntcuFaalb said it was an easy fix and e-mailed Jay about it.

Ric was an entertaining sock because he seemed to have a personality of his own, like a good ventriloquist's dummy. Other socks achieved this in the short term, but Ric remained amusing in the long term, partly because we all knew that he was a sock who wouldn't be overused or used negatively: it was a running joke. The fact that Frink was allowed him for this reason (and because he slipped through the net) made the forum a brighter place. It's a shame that he was a casualty of the recent activity, and I would respectfully ask that he be reinstated.

I'm not sure if this matters because I don't post very often but I used Crappy_Logo_Productions back in '05 to talk about the few fan edits I did. Feel free to do what you want with that account Moth3r. I stopped posting with it after getting a cease and desist letter due to my Pulp Fiction edit. I'll return to lurker mode now.

Ric was an entertaining sock because he seemed to have a personality of his own, like a good ventriloquist's dummy. Other socks achieved this in the short term, but Ric remained amusing in the long term, partly because we all knew that he was a sock who wouldn't be overused or used negatively: it was a running joke. The fact that Frink was allowed him for this reason (and because he slipped through the net) made the forum a brighter place. It's a shame that he was a casualty of the recent activity, and I would respectfully ask that he be reinstated.